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Asian Religions

Review Essays of Academic, Professional &
Technical Books in the Humanities &
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Chinese Religion

Popular Religion and Shamanism by
Edited by Ma Xisha and Meng Huiying
(Religious Studies in Contemporary China
Collection: Brill Academic) addresses
two areas of religion within Chinese
society; the lay teachings that Chinese
scholars term folk or `popular' religion,
and shamanism. Each area represents a
distinct tradition of scholarship, and the
book is therefore split into two parts.
PART I: Popular Religion discusses the evolution
of organized lay movements over an arc often
centuries. Its eight chapters focus on three
key points: the arrival and integration of
new ideas before the Song dynasty, the
coalescence of an intellectual and
scriptural tradition during the Ming, and
the efflorescence of new organizations
during the late Qing.
PART II: Shamanism reflects the revived interest
of scholars in traditional beliefs and
culture that reemerged with the 'open'
policy in China that occurred in the 197os.
Two of the essays included in this section
address shamanism in northeast China where
the traditions played an important role in
the cultures of the Manchu, Mongol, Sibe,
Daur, Oroqen, Evenki, and Hezhen. The other
essay discusses divination rites in a local
culture of southwest China.
Both sections of Popular Religion and
Shamanism will introduce Western readers to
the ideas of Chinese scholars, not just
their data.

Excerpt: It can be a hard task to describe the big
picture view of religion in China. The most
natural place to begin is with the three
canonical beliefs of Confucianism, Buddhism
and Daoism. Focusing on these three
teachings provides some obvious advantages:
each one is a more-or-less concrete entity
with a founder, scriptures, and discrete
intellectual genealogy. This tactic also
represents an important and lasting
political reality: since the time that
doctrinal Buddhism became firmly established
in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, the
governments of China's various dynasties
interacted with religion (not always with
approval) largely in terms of these three
big teachings. While the teachings of
Confucius came to be synonymous with the
imperial state itself, Buddhism and Daoism
were incorporated differently, enjoying
approval and even support, in return for
accepting state regulation of their doctrine
and affairs. The present-day Chinese state
roughly follows an elaboration of this
policy, with officially sanctioned bodies
representing Buddhism and Daoism, as well as
Christianity and Islam. So to a large extent
do scholars, including the editors of this
series, who have published separate volumes
on each of the canonical religions.

But working with the canonical teachings
also has some very important shortcomings.
For one, it artificially separates them.
While Buddhism and Daoism each constituted a
discrete and self-contained intellectual
world, they also interacted with each other:
even the classic canons of Buddhist and
Daoist scripture show how easily ideas,
concepts and even deities crossed the lines
between the two teachings. More importantly,
lived religion freely integrates what it
calls the "three teachings." Both visually
and in scripture, Confucius, Laozi and the
Buddha are commonly portrayed together, and
their statues frequently share the same
space in temples and shrines. A Buddhist
temple in China that did not have some
representation of Daoist deities or
Confucian moral exhortations would be the
exception, rather than the rule. Conversely,
a great deal of religious practice falls
between the three canonical teachings. Most
of China's lived religion: temple fairs,
village processions, local deities, as well
as healing, exorcistic and mortuary ritual—the real stuff of Chinese
religious life at all levels of society—are
in some ways linked to the canonical
teachings, but do not belong exclusively to
any one of them.

Half a century ago, the sociologist C. K.
Yang (Yang Qingkun) proposed the model of
two types of religion in China: the
"institutional" religions that we would
associate with formal, organized clergies,
and thus with the three canonical religions,
and the ocean of local and personal
practices that he termed "diffused"
religion.' This model is not perfect no
model is—but it remains a useful way of
thinking about the long path from individual
devotion to formal and organized religious
institutions. History shows us that many
factors shape this process. Religious ideas
and piety themselves play a large role, but
not a total one. Ideas also contend with the
good or ill will of states, conditions of
economic rise or decline, and a society that
may be peaceful or may be unsettled.
Moreover, there are many types of
institutional religion. The term may mean an
organized church, but it may also signify a
lay movement, an established tradition of
practice, or any generally accepted
tradition of ideas. Beyond the three
canonical teachings, Chinese religion also
incorporates these many other types of
institutionalization.

The first part of this volume traces the
rise of one of the most unique and important
of these institutions, the one that the
title identifies as "folk religion." This
term, often translated as "popular religion"
(minjian zoneao), has a very specific
meaning: it is a shorthand used by scholars
in China to refer to the particular
religious tradition that most Western
historians would call "sectarianism," or
more broadly, the "White Lotus Teaching."
(Neither name is precisely accurate, a point
to which we will return later.) These terms
will certainly be familiar to any student of
China's modern history, most commonly in the
context of religious rebellion. Religious
groups in the White Lotus tradition are
often given credit for overthrowing the
Mongol Yuan dynasty, and led the series of
domestic military disasters—the Nian and
Taiping Rebellions and Boxer Uprising that
laid low the mighty Qing during the
nineteenth century. Most will know these
groups for their integration of religion and
warfare: the use of magical charms to ward
off bullets, the claims to turn beans into
soldiers, and most notably the political
messianism that justly struck terror into
the ruling elite. But these occasional
flashes of violence were only one
manifestation of a much deeper and more
prevalent tradition, one that had already
begun to form centuries earlier. The essays
in this volume show the entire arc of this
long-term evolution, focusing on three key
points: the arrival and integration of new
ideas before the Song dynasty, the
coalescence of an intellectual and
scriptural tradition during the Ming, and
the efflorescence of new organizations
during the late Qing.

Part 1: Intellectual Antecedents

The first chapter by Ma Xisha examines
the integration of Manichaeism, which
entered China from Central Asia via the Silk
Road, into a preexisting tradition of
beliefs surrounding the Maitreya Buddha. The
Maitreya Buddha has a long history as a
salvationist figure in China. As early as
the Southern and Northern Dynasties
(420-589), this Buddha was worshipped as the
lord of a paradise called the Maitreya Pure
Land. This was a postmortem paradise, a
repose for individual souls, in what
scholars often refer as the "ascending"
motif of salvationism.2 Maitreya was also
the central figure of a "descending" motif,
in which he was prophesied to come down from
heaven and establish a physical paradise on
earth. Over time, it was the latter image
that came to dominate the worship of
Maitreya. Beginning in the Wei Dynasty, a
corpus of "false scriptures" elaborated the
cosmology of Maitreya worship, including the
characteristic tripartite division of time,
and the story of the Dragon Flower Assembly,
an event which inaugurates the reign of the
messiah Buddha. To this, Manichaeism easily
added its own conception of the "three
times," as well as its characteristic belief
in the antagonistic "two principles" of
light and darkness, the idea of original
sin, and a harsh devotional regimen.
Maitreyan and Manichaean belief systems had
fully merged by the Sui Dynasty (581-618),
the same time that sources began to report
the existence of groups of faithful who wore
white robes, buried their dead naked, and
conducted secret nocturnal rituals, "meeting
at night and dispersing at dawn." Groups
that combined the descent of Maitreya with
the Manichean "King of Light" (ming wang)
were quickly seen as a threat to public
order, and banned during the Tang and Song
dynasties. But they continued to spread
underground, most famously to reappear in
the late Yuan as the "Incense Army"
(xiangjun) that participated in the
overthrow of the Mongol dynasty.

Lin Wushu *Win examines the establishment
of Manichaeism in greater detail, focusing
specifically on the many names used for
Manichaeism to show the path taken by the
teaching as it was driven underground. He
has a very difficult task. It is never easy
to follow an organization that wishes to
remain hidden, but this case is made even
more difficult by that fact that Manichaeism
in China was never centralized, and freely
broke into splinter groups and local
communities. Moreover, many of the names for
Manichaeism that appear in historical
sources were coined by outsiders, in some
cases by the same forces that sought to
eradicate the teaching. Yet another
difficulty is the fact that sources
themselves are exceedingly rare: one of the
more complete accounts is a mere four
hundred sixty seven characters, and has
already been mined by earlier generations of
Sinologists such as Edouard Chavannes, Paul
Pelliot and Wang Guowei. Lin combs over
every available scrap of evidence, including stelae and Dunhuang fragments, to determine
what terms contemporary believers would have
used referred to themselves, their religion,
and their founder. To demonstrate the many
problems inherent in tracing an organization
through its changing name, he raises the
example of two other foreign religions,
Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity.
Through this analysis of names, Lin shows
how Manichaeism was transformed in China,
especially after 841, when the teaching was
outlawed in conjunction with the Huichang
persecution of Buddhism. During this time,
Manichaeism became known by a wide variety
of pseudonyms, most notably the "Teaching of
Light" (ming jiao), as well as by a
variety of euphemisms such as the "people of
the double collar crossings," some of which
were given by outsiders, others used by the
teaching itself in order to avoid detection.

Part 2: Formation of Tradition

The next two chapters move forward to the
Ming, the point at which
many of the diverse ideas in this tradition
began to take on a more clear, organized form. The impetus for
this change was certainly not a more
favorable political climate. Teachings such
as Manichaeism had been suppressed during
the Tang, and even if some were briefly
rehabilitated, the role that groups such as
the "Incense Army" had played in organizing
resistance to the Yuan had convinced Zhu
Yuanzhang, their erstwhile ally and founding
emperor of the new Ming dynasty, to outlaw
them even more strictly than before.'
Rather, the chapter by Lin Guoping
shows that this change was due at least in
part to an intellectual shift: the
consolidation of a tradition of ideas into a
coherent theology. Lin examines the
transformation of Ming literatus Lin Zhao'en
from Confucian intellectual to religious
leader during his lifetime, and into a cult
figure after his death. Lin Zhao'en is well
known for his synthesis of Confucian,
Buddhist and Daoist elements into a single
teaching, one that followed upon the
"heart-mind learning" of Wang Yangming.
Initially, Lin spread his ideas only among
fellow literati, but his fame and his
teachings soon began to spread, buoyed in no
small part by the role Lin played in
spending his own fortune to alleviate the
suffering caused by pirate attacks on the
Fujian coast. By the 1580s, Lin had
developed a widespread reputation for
morality and benevolence, an extended
network of missionaries and temples devoted
to his teaching, and a large number of
followers, many of whom revered Lin as a
divine figure. Lin's apotheosis accelerated
after his death. At the same time, his
"three-in-one" teaching (Sanyijiao)
continued to evolve, as new generations of
followers added elements such as Buddhist
karma and Daoist incantation. Alarmed by its
rapid spread, early Qing emperors banned the
teaching, but even this did not stop the
ideas and apotheosis of Lin Zhao'en from
continuing to evolve locally in Fujian.

The subsequent chapter by Ma Xisha traces
the evolution of one of the most influential
early organizations: the Luo Teaching (Luo
jiao), and its offshoot society called the
Green Gang (Qngbang). Ma uses a
combination of Qing archives and sectarian
scriptures, known as "precious scrolls"
(baojuan) to trace the origins of the Luo
Teaching to its founder, Luo Jing TO-, a
soldier detailed with the task of
transporting grain from the south to the
frontier garrison at Miyun, near Beijing. After Luo's
death, his teaching broke into branches,
which continued to spread among the sailors
who plied the riverine grain transport
system along the Grand Canal. In this form,
the Luo Teaching gave spiritual comfort to
this displaced group, but the real
attraction of the teaching was as trade and
mutual aid organization. Most sailors on the
canal belonged to one of three branches,
which provided solidarity, lodging, and
occasional opportunities for plunder. The
relocation of grain transport from the canal
system to the open sea during the early
nineteenth century decimated the entire
industry of riverine transport, prompting
many to reorganize into a smuggling gang
called the "Friends of the Way of
Tranquility and Purity" (anqing daoyou).
This group (the apparently ironic title was
actually an amalgam of two place names)
would eventually transform into the Green
Gang, one of the most famous and feared
"secret societies" of the modern era. The
point that Ma makes in this chapter is that
the entire evolutionary trajectory from Luo
Teaching to Green Gang was driven by the
financial and social needs of its members.
The rise of the organization was less a
function of religious evolution than of the
economic transformation of Qing society.

Part 3: New Teachings and Organizations

The third section introduces the wave of
new teachings that appeared in the
nineteenth century. Like Ma Xisha's chapter
on the Luo Teaching, these chapters focus
primarily on how the teachings functioned in
society, but working with the richer sources
of a later period, they are able to present
a much more detailed image of who led and
joined these groups, and how different sorts
of individuals, both insiders and outsiders,
interacted with the teachings
intellectually, economically and socially.
One advantage that scholars in the study of
more recent events have over their
counterparts in the previous sections is the
ability to conduct fieldwork, that is, to
interview eyewitnesses or their descendants,
and occasionally to see the remnants of
ideas and practices that still survive in
villages today. Among earlier chapters, Lin
Guoping had employed fieldwork to sketch out
the remnants of the cult of Lin Zhao'en. Two
chapters in this section use this sort of
data to even greater effect.

The first chapter is Han Bingfang's
examination of the Yellow Cliff Teaching
(Huangya jiao). Like the discussion of
Lin Zhao'en's mid-Ming Three-in-One
Teaching, this chapter traces the process by
which the eclectic ideas of a Confucian
literatus came to absorb a variety of
religious ideas and practices, and later
became the core of a religious and social
movement. The ideas that would eventually
come to be known as the Yellow Cliff
Teaching were formed by the mid-Qing scholar
Zhou Taigu who like Lin Zhao'en, saw each of
the three teachings not as competing
entities, but as various expressions of a
greater truth. In a theme that was echoed by
many of his contemporaries, Zhou Taigu saw
his synthetic theory not as a personal
innovation, but as the authentic essence of
the three teachings, particularly of
Confucianism. He thus traced his
intellectual lineage through a line of
scholarly luminaries, including Zhu Xi,
Mencius, and finally to Confucius and the
Duke of Zhou. Zhou's teaching was banned
during his lifetime, but like the
Three-in-One and Luo Teachings of previous
chapters, continued to evolve as separate
movements after the death of the founder.
Many of these branches died out, but some
survived, most notably the Taigu School that
moved with its leader Zhang Jizhong to establish a utopian community
in the mountains of central Shandong
province. This community maintained a strict
hierarchy of religious authority, a communal
ritual regimen, and all of the moral
admonitions of a Confucian society, but also
took the practical step to arm itself
against intrusion from the outside. Their
seriousness of purpose cannot be doubted:
when government troops moved to dislodge the
community in 1866, members fought to the
death, and when hope of resistance was lost,
many of the remaining members committed
suicide.

The second chapter comes from Lu Yao'sx
pathbreaking work on the Yihetuan (Society
of Righteousness and Harmony). This group is
better known in English as the eponymic
Boxers of the Boxer Uprising, an episode
that was of pivotal importance to the
history of modern China. It marked the death
knell of the long-decaying Qing dynasty, and
ended with the occupation of Beijing by
foreign troops. The political significance
of this event has left the earlier origins
of the Yihetuan movement deeply mired in
controversy. One view that was common to the
nationalist scholarship of an earlier era,
and has more recently been expressed by
Western scholars as well, was that the
Yihetuan was primarily an anti-foreign
movement, goaded into action primarily by the callousness of
Catholic missionaries operating in Shandong.
Another view casts the Yihetuan was another
expression of a more enduring tradition of
underground militant organizations, one that
that shared the religious orientation of
groups such as the Luo Teaching or the
Yellow Cliff Teaching. Lu Yao falls firmly
into this latter camp. He begins by tracing
the origins of the Yihetuan to a style of
martial arts called the Plum Blossom Fists
(Meihua quan), and to the "martial field"
(wu chang) of the Li Trigram Teaching (Li
gua jiao IF C). From there, Lu continues to
trace the axis of militarized religion back
to groups that flourished in the transition
from Ming to Qing, to demonstrate that the
Yihetuan did not merely resemble these
earlier organizations, it was in fact
directly descended from them. In this way,
he shows how the late nineteenth century
Yihetuan was a continuation of much earlier
instances of religious violence, notably the
Wang Lun TM- Rebellion of 1774, and Linqing
sill Rebellion of 1813. Of course, this
chapter is only concerned with the origins
of the Yihetuan, leaving readers to look
elsewhere for the story of its spread and
evolution during the uprising itself. Here,
it is interesting to refer to earlier
chapters, which show the once-unified Luo
and Three in One Teachings (not to mention
more dispersed Manichean tradition)
splintering into sects and schools. The
Yihetuan underwent a similar process, but
much more quickly. The lightning fast
transformation of the Yihetuan into a mass
movement in 1899 was not a splintering, so
much as a river bursting its banks. Once it
was loosed, the violence of the movement
took on a life of its own, propelled by
religious or anti-foreign ideals, but also
by economic motives and personal grudges.'

Zhou Yumin's A' seventh chapter examines
the rise of another well-known religious
teaching, the Yiguandao —Vat, or Way of
Penetrating Unity. Like many of the chapters
in this volume, this piece seeks to unravel
the genealogy of an underground
organization—no easy task even in the
present day. In this chapter, the task is
further complicated by the subsequent
history of the Yiguandao. While the Yihetuan
has been praised by nationalist historians
as a patriotic organization, the Yiguandao
has trod a more tortuous path: it rose to
national prominence as an apocalyptic sect
during the 1930s, was crushed in a 1951
campaign, but has since come to flourish in
Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Given all that
has transpired in the subsequent history of
the Yiguandao, understanding its early
origins becomes all the more important. As
with the Yihetuan, the fundamental question
is whether the teaching rose as a response
to uniquely modern pressures (in the case of
the Yiguandao, this would be the brutality
of the Japanese occupation of northern China
from 1937-1945), or whether it evolved out
of an earlier organization. Here again, a
close examination of the historical sources
reveals it to be the latter. But the
Yihetuan is not merely a point of
comparison: Zhou demonstrates that the two
movements were concretely linked through a
common ancestor in the mid-Qing Blue Lotus
Sect (Qnglian jiao WAR). As the other
chapters in this section demonstrate, the
wave of teachings seen in the late Qing and
early Republic were themselves nothing
fundamentally new. Rather, what was new was
the ability of these organizations to
organize on a large and increasingly public
scale, and conversely, the decreasing
ability of strict hierarchies of patriarchs
to maintain unity and order within the
teaching. The same process that allowed the
Yihetuan to transform into a mass movement
also produced a sea of lesser movements such
as the early Yiguandao that easily merged,
split and cooperated with other teachings.

The final chapter by Yu Songqing UMW is
something of a departure from the others in
this section, and indeed from the volume as
a whole. While earlier chapters trace
individual ideas or teachings, this chapter
examines "secret popular religion," (minjian
mimi zongjiao 117 Wt) and specifically the
place of women within it, as a single,
evolving social phenomenon. It begins by
examining the presentation of women in
scripture: including both moral admonitions
for women's behavior, and the elaboration of
female deities, most notably the
characteristic sectarian deity, Eternal
Venerable Mother (wusheng laomu) a name that literally translates as the
"unborn mother" but more correctly connotes
her transcendence of birth and death.)
Beyond the importance of maternal deities,
Yu notes that teachings in this tradition
often held a special attraction for women
devotees, and moreover that women frequently
rose to positions of real power in them,
both as teachers and even as military
leaders. The source of this attraction was
partially a matter of opportunity, but more
fundamentally the fact that these shadowy teachings were an
organized rejection of the elite Confucian
patriarchy. Certainly the elite themselves
saw things this way. In his famous
anti-sectarian polemic, "A Detailed
Refutation of Heretical Teachings" (Poxie
xiangbian), the early nineteenth century
magistrate Huang Yupian named the mingling
of sexes at illicit midnight meetings as
among the worst improprieties committed by
these groups. Even if these meetings were
not themselves sexually promiscuous, Yu
holds that they were nevertheless a threat
to the fundamental hierarchy of Confucian
society, one which both subordinated and
feared women. This essay is interesting not
merely because it takes such a unique
approach to the topic of sectarianism, but
also because it is so overtly political.
Originally published in 1985, years before
most of the other chapters, it reflects the
strong Marxist coloring that ran through an
earlier generation of scholarship on
religion. Yu is certainly correct that these
religions had a special attraction for the
dispossessed, and were indeed a threat to
orthodox hierarchy. The fact that this essay
occasionally wanders into the self-reflexive
class-based approach of an earlier era
(i.e., the landlord class is definitionally
hypocritical and lecherous) need not let it
distract us from its scholarly contribution.

Themes and Contributions

These essays comprise the best work of
some of the most important scholars in the
field. Their contribution is as enormous as
it is varied. The first chapters weave a
detailed picture of an evolving system of
belief, all the more remarkable since both
authors were forced to work with such scant
evidence: scriptures of which nothing
remains but a title, incomplete stone stele,
or scraps of documents preserved in the
sands of Dunhuang.

As we move forward in time, authors of
subsequent chapters have far more evidence
at their disposal, but not necessarily an
easier task. The tradition of scriptures
known as known as baojuan began to form
during the early Ming dynasty, and presents
the theology and history of the new
teachings in their own words. The problem is
that such scriptures are heavily stylized,
and tend to conform to a fairly
well-established set of parameters and
conventions. The founding of a teaching, for
example, will often be written to include a
number of stock elements: the moral decay of
the world, the sending of a divine
messenger, and miraculous proof of the
founder's power. Some conventions were
specifically meant to disguise a teaching's
movements or structure from outsiders, but
even these need not be a liability. In some
cases, they constitute a kind of code, which
this volume's authors use to their
advantage. One recurring theme is reference
to the Eight Trigrams (ba ,gua These eight
symbols, each consisting of a combination of
three whole or broken lines, are both a
system of divination, and an expression of a
universal cycle of natural phenomena, such
as seasons, colors or compass directions. It
was a fairly common practice for religious
teachings to base their organization on the
Eight Trigrams. The founding patriarch of a
teaching would name eight disciples, who
were then sent off in the eight directions,
each to found a lineage named after the
corresponding trigram. Thus the disciple of
the Li Trigram would travel to the south,
the Dui Trigram to the West, and so on. One
example is the Heaven and Earth Teaching
(Tiandimen jiao), which was founded by
patriarch Dong Sihai in Shandong Province during the early
Qing. According to scriptures preserved
locally, Dong sent the disciple Ma Kaishan
to the north, the direction corresponding to
the Kan A' Trigram. This branch extends in a
more or less straight line to the north of
Shandong, corresponding in part to Ma's
actual travels: to Hebei, Tianjin, Beijing,
and into Manchuria. The teaching remains
active in these areas today, and still
refers to itself as the Kan Trigram. The
chapters of this volume delve much more
deeply into the clues that are coded into
this system. Being expressions of basic
universal forces (specifically, combinations
of yin and yang), the eight trigrams also
correspond to elements such as colors, all
of which can give clues to a group's
identity. Thus, from a record of a rebel
army that "wore black caps, black clothes
and shoes, so that they looked like ghosts"
Lu Yao concludes that this group belonged to
the Kan Trigram, which corresponds not only
to the direction north, but also to the
color black. Moreover, it is likely that the
official who wrote the original record
himself did understand the significance of
this color, but to a sect insider, such
references were commonplace.

Sources that preserve the views of
outsiders, such as criminal investigations,
local gazetteers, and the writings of
literati, also become more plentiful during
this period. Such sources come with
limitations of a different sort. As much as
scriptures, these writings are also heavily
coded, albeit often in a way that hides more
about the sects themselves than it reveals.
Government accounts, for example, are by
nature concerned with criminality, and thus
portray religious groups primarily in terms
of deviant, treasonous or heretical
behavior. This problem is not unique to
China: historian of Spanish religion William
Christian once compared the use of
Inquisition records to "trying to get a
sense of everyday American political life
from FBI files." What these chapters reveal
is how enduring this official code, what we
may think of as the language of orthodoxy,
has proven over the course of many
centuries. Phrases such as "abstaining from
meat and worshipping demons" (chicai shimo)
appear in nearly every account of banned
teachings, and on their own tell us very
little apart from the expectations of the
writer and his audience. The same may be
said for stock concerns about the illicit
mixing of sexes at nocturnal meetings,
expressed in set phrases such as "gathering
at night and dispersing at dawn." The first
chapter in this volume recounts the claim of
Song dynasty Manichaeans that: "Those who do
not keep the two sexes separate are
considered devils, and those who do not
allow men and women to touch hands while
giving and receiving are considered
Manichaeans. Manichaeans will not eat food
that has been cooked by a woman." This
strong defense suggests that the group was
facing down charges or at least rumors of
deviant sexual behavior that (like theft and
sorcery) so often among the stock charges
levied against any suspicious religious
teaching. Interestingly, the exact phrase
about not touching hands while giving and
receiving also appears in the last chapter,
as well. I would argue that part of what
makes the evolving tradition of "popular
religion" a discrete institution is
precisely the continuity of how and why it
was criminalized by the imperial state. In
this sense, the tradition continues. The
charges raised during the movement to crush
the Yiguandao in the 1950s, and more
recently, the campaign to suppress Falungong
almost always returned to sexual
promiscuity, specifically the charge that
sect leaders routinely kept brainwashed
female followers in a state of sexual
slavery.

This brief discussion of sources all
points to one of the greatest obstacles to
understanding this religious tradition: the
problems of naming and terminology. Barend
ter Haar has been the most insistent and
incisive critic of the categories used in
sources. The most notable and problematic of
these is the aforementioned "White Lotus
Teaching" (bailian jiao AR), a term that was
employed by sources, and until relatively
recently by scholars to refer generally to
the entire religious tradition covered in
this volume. The problem is that
historically, no White Lotus Teaching, as
such, ever existed. Ter Haar's point is that
the use of the term in sources (and thus in
official discourse) was more than merely a
shorthand convention, it was a way of
collapsing this very broad range of groups
and teachings into a single category, while
at the same time painting it with a single
criminalizing brush.' In that way,
references to these teachings as White Lotus
are essentially synonymous with the equally
ubiquitous "heresy" (xie jiao literally a
"crooked teaching," sometimes translated as
"heterodoxy"). Neither term is in any way
revealing about the teaching itself,
although both are unequivocal statements of
official attitudes. "Heresy" was more than
just a pejorative, it was a legal category
that if applied to a teaching demanded
(according to Ming and Qing penal codes)
execution for leaders and exile for
followers. Thus, while the actual criminal
investigations that followed upon an
outbreak of religious violence, or
occasional treatises such as the Detailed
Refutation of Heterodox Teachings (poxie
xiangbian) might attempt to examine or
discuss the teachings in detail, other
sources such as local gazetteers were happy
to speak in general terms precisely because
what was important to them, the criminality
of these groups, was summed up very nicely
in terms such as "White Lotus." Something
very similar could be said for the use of terms like "superstition"
(mixin) by official publications during the
twentieth century and today.

The problems of naming and the accuracy
of terminology are a recurring theme in many
of the essays. Thus, chapters build their
arguments around questions such as what
exactly was meant by terms such as "Father
of Light," or whether religions recorded
with different names in the sources were in
fact the same organization. But it also
raises the question of the choice of terms
used in the study of religion. The "folk
religion" title of this volume is one
variation of many terms employed by Chinese
scholars. Others would include the "secret
popular religions" used by Yu Songqing and
many others, or the "secret societies" (mimi
jieshe, mimi shehui) that also runs
through a broad swath of historical
scholarship. It need hardly be said that
even if scholars are themselves more
sympathetic to these religions than the
generations of imperial officials who styled
them heresies, the effect is still largely
the same: naming a tradition essentially
creates, in retrospect, a religious
institution. The problem lies in the fact
that using a term such as "popular religion"
suggests a degree of uniformity and
coherence that might have been appropriate
in the case of the later teachings, but
cannot be written to retroactively include
the Ming Luo Teaching or Song Manichaeism
into a single line of evolutionary destiny.
Such implications do not come from the
essays themselves, but rather by their
combination into a single volume, and should
be taken into account by the reader.

The pitfalls of translation are further
complicated by the layers of meaning implied
by the English language terminology. It is
common, for example, to translate jiao IA as
"sect," and the so-called White Lotus
tradition as "sectarianism." Some, however,
have objected that terms such as "sect,"
themselves suggest an air of illegality, and
could be taken to imply an illegitimate
offshoot of a properly authorized religion.
The language used in English translation
thus has the danger of simply repeating the
pejorative biases of the original Chinese.
However, our purpose in this volume was
simply to reproduce the Chinese original as
faithfully as possible, and not to edit the
English in order to fit Western scholarly
conventions. "Jiao" thus appears as
"teaching" or occasionally as "sect," as we
felt context better suggested. Nor did we
alter or comment on those places where a
Chinese approach might grate against Western
scholarly sensibilities: such as when Lin
Guoping asks whether the Three-in-One
Teaching was a religion "in the strictest
sense," or when Yu Songqing includes the
perspectives of class struggle. Beyond the
obvious fact that we as translators would
have no right to do so, we feel that the
whole point of this series is to introduce
Western readers to the ideas of Chinese
scholars, not just their data.

Finally, although I was given the honor
of writing the introduction, I would like to
express my thanks to my good friend and
collaborator Dr. Chi Zhen for having done
the hard work on the translation. My own
contribution to this effort paled in
relation to his, a fact that I gratefully
acknowledge here. For entirely selfish
reasons, I would also like to thank Brill
for inviting me to participate in this
project. I had already read many of these
classic essays in their Chinese original,
but this project required much closer and
more detailed attention than I had ever been
able to devote to them before. I have
learned an immense amount in the process,
and hope that the readers of this volume
will gain as much from it as I have.

GREAT PERFECTION: Religion and Ethnicity in a Chinese
Millennial Kingdom by Terry F. Kleeman (Hardcover, 248 pages University of Hawaii
Press; ISBN: 0824818008)

This study provides the first sustained account of the social and
political dimensions of Daoism as illustrated in the Great perfection kingdom and its
history in China. This study should contribute significantly in the reshaping the western
image of the history of Daoism in China.

GREAT PERFECTION tells the story of the Ba people and of the Li
family in particular. Engaging the most recent scholarship in Western, Chinese, and
Japanese languages (including archaeological and ethnological publications), the study
begins in the mists of prehistory, traces the early history of the Ba, chronicles the rise
of the Daoist faith and their role in it, then sets forth in detail a chronicle of the
state of Great Perfection. Central to the work is a translation of all surviving
historical records concerning the state, which have been conflated here in an attempt to
reconstruct the lost Book of the Lis of Sichuan, a contemporary first-hand source by the
state's historian. As the first study in any Western language devoted to the Ba or to the
Great Perfection kingdom, this volume breaks new ground in Chinese ethnography and
history. As the first book-length treatment of a Daoist millennial kingdom, it is a major
contribution to the history of early Daoism and a significant addition to scholarship on
apocalyptic thought worldwide.

Hinton approach to translation is a poetic rendering well
grounded in meticulous scholarship and a good ear for idiomatic English. These handsome
volumes offer contemporary renderings of this axle works of Chinese classic civilization
in a sensitive nuanced English that is faithful to a spiritual reading of the texts.

This volume offers a comprehensive philosophical study of Confucian ethics-its basic
insights and its relevance to contemporary Western moral philosophy. Distinguished writer
and philosopher A. S. Cua presents fourteen essays which deal with various problems
arising in the philosophical explication of the nature of Chinese ethical thought.

Offering a unique analytical approach, Cua focuses on the conceptual and dialectical
aspects of Confucian ethics. Among the topics discussed are: the nature and significance
of the Chinese Confucian moral vision of tao; the complementary insights of Classical
Taoism, namely of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu; and the logical and rhetorical aspects of
Confucian ethics.

Perhaps more relevant to contemporary East-West ethical discourse, several essays
present an introduction to a systematic Confucian moral philosophy. Cua explains the idea
of a living, Confucian, ethical tradition and highlights the problem of interpreting the
cardinal concepts of Confucian ethics as an ethics of virtue. Much of the effort is spent
in shaping concepts such as jen (humanity), i (rightness), and li (ritual propriety) in
the light of the Confucian ideal or vision of tao. Among the topics discussed are: the
nature and significance of the Chinese Confucian moral vision of tao; the complementary
insights of Classical Taoism, namely, of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu; and the logical and
rhetorical aspects of Confucian ethics. Perhaps more relevant to contemporary East-West
ethical discourse, several essays introduce a systematic Confucian moral philosophy. Cua
concludes with a discussion of the possibility of reasoned discourse, aiming at a
resolution of intercultural, ethical conflict.

This book will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars interested in ethics, Chinese
philosophy, comparative Chinese and Western ethical thought, and Confucianism.

Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Reasonable Action and Confucian Argumentation
2. Confucian Vision and Experience of the World
3. Forgetting Morality: Reflections on a Theme in Chuang Tzu
4. Chinese Moral Vision, Responsive Agency, and Factual Beliefs
5. Opposites as Complements: Reflections on the Significance of Tao
6. Morality and Human Nature
7. Harmony and the Neo-Confucian Sage
8. Competence, Concern, and the Role of Paradigmatic Individuals (Chun tzu) in Moral
Education
9. Between Commitment and Realization: Wang Yang-ming's Vision of the
Universe as a Moral Community
10. The Possibility of a Confucian Theory of Rhetoric
11. A Confucian Perspective on Self-Deception
12. The Confucian Tradition (Tao-t'ung)
13. Basic Concepts of Confucian Ethics
14. Principles as Preconditions of Adjudication
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

A. S. Cua, professor emeritus of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, is
the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethical Argumentation: A Study in
Hsun Tzu's Moral Epistemology (1985), The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Study in Wang
Yang-ming's Moral Psychology (1982), and Dimensions of Moral Creativity (1978). He also
serves as coeditor of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, associate editor of the
International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia
of Chinese Philosophy.

This book is the first major reassessment of ancient Chinese religion to appear in
recent years. It provides a historical investigation of broadly shared religious beliefs
and goals in ancient China from the earliest period to the end of the Han Dynasty. The
author makes use of recently acquired archeological data, traditional texts, and modern
scholarly work from China, Japan, and the West. The overall concern of this book is to try
to reach the religious mentality of the ancient Chinese in the context of personal and
daily experiences. Poo deals with such problems as the definition of religion, the
popular/elite controversy in methodology, and the use of "elite" documents in
the study of ordinary life.

This emphasis upon the religious mentality and everyday practice of religion brings
into focus new ways of appreciating the documentary evidence of archaic Chinese religion.
In many ways, this is a immoderate thesis in terms of its focus on the common
religion of everyday life and its discussion of the overlap and interaction between the
elite and common levels of religion in early imperial China and
will be controversial in the best sense of the expression. There is nothing on ancient
Chinese religion (in any language) that is quite like Poos book. It is truly
pioneering in this respect to its analysis of fundamental documents.

"One of the most illuminating studies on early Chinese religion I have read
in a long time, it is well written, cogently argued, and based upon impeccable research.
Poo has been able to make use of the great mass of new archaeological material that has
been accumulating through the last two or three decades in China and Japan, and he has
also mastered the best Western scholarship on Chinese religion. His grasp of both sets of
materials is pertinent, accurate, and fascinating. I frankly think that anyone interested
in Chinese religion would want to buy this book. I believe it will become something of a
standard reference." John Berthrong, author of All Under Heaven: Transforming
Paradigms in Confucian-Christian Dialogue

Mu-chou Poo is Research Fellow and Professor at the Institute of History and Philology,
Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He is the author of several works, including Wine and Wine
Offering in the Religion of Ancient Egypt (Kegan Paul International); Literature
by the Nile: An Anthology of Ancient Egyptian Literature; and Burial Styles and
Ideas of Life and Death.

COMPASSION AND
BENEVOLENCE reveals the heart of early Buddhist and classical Confucian ethics in a
comparative way. It explores compassion (karuna) and benevolence (jen) by analyzing their
mechanisms, their moral ground-works, their applications, and their meta-ethical nature.
Compassion and benevolence are taken as self-transformative virtues on the way to becoming
an enlightened one and a sage. This exploration intends to reject the popular theses:
early Buddhism is only self-liberation concerned soteriology and classical Confucianism is
only society-concerned thought requiring self-effacement.

Ok-Sun An studied comparative ethics and received a Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii,
Manoa. Currently she is concerned with interpreting Buddhist and Confucian ethics from a
feminist perspective. She teaches philosophy in Korea.

There maybe a more dialogical relationship between the ethics of Buddhism and Chinese
thought, especially Confucianism. A daughter of a professor of Chinese philosophy in
Korea, Ok-Sun An, is well equipped with the knowledge of classical Chinese and who
studied Sanskrit and Pali at the University of Hawaii. She has worked out in great detail
the philosophical relationship between early Confucianism and early Buddhism, the Pali
Nikayas as being her sources for the latter. She focuses on their ethical theories
by beginning to redefine what is meant by self-transformation in Buddhism and
Confucianism. She distinguishes it from the popular Western conceptions, for
self-transformation is the foundation of any reasonable ethical theory. Then she
undertakes a detailed analysis of the Buddhist and Confucian virtues and follows it up
with a comparison of the Buddhas concept of compassion and the Confucian
notion of benevolence, which is the meat of her thesis.

The realization of these virtues in early Buddhism and early Confucianism draws her
attention next. Finally, she deals with the philosophical problem of the objectivity of
virtues, so important for both traditions that she was dealing with, placing them in the
context of the materialistic and emotivistic schools of the East and the West.

An is not attempting to present an exaggerated identity between Buddhism and
Confucianism. She faces directly some of the important differences between them and
presents a sympathetic, but not apologetic, analysis of the thoughts of two remarkable
philosophers of the world. Her work should eliminate any doubts as to the philosophical
appeal of Buddhism to the Chinese mind.

EXCERPT:

The present volume aims to interpret and compare early Buddhist ethics with
classical Confucian ethics from the perspective of self transformation. The early Buddhist
philosophical and moral tradition is strikingly different from that of classical
Confucianism. Since early Buddhism and classical Confucianism developed their own unique
traditions in different cultural settings, philosophical and moral differences are
inevitable. However, we also find significant similarities in these different paradigms of
thought. These similarities are revealed when one focuses on the conceptions of self
transformation.

The similarities originate in a shared position. The major concern of both
systems is the cultivation and development of a desirable character through the process of
transforming oneself. One may call this "character building ethics."

In both ethical systems, self-transformation is perceived as a constant and
challenging task. It is constant because it is achieved not at one moment, but through
gradually accumulated effort. It is challenging because changes of the situation of the
transforming person, and interactions with others are involved. The core task of
self-transformation embodying compassion or benevolence is to follow the path toward
realization of the highest moral goal which is freedom or happiness (nibbana tao) of the
self and others. This virtue cannot be perfectly accomplished by pursuing it for oneself.
This means that an emphasis on transformation only of oneself will involve
misinterpretation of both systems of ethics. In this way, the following common
interpretations will not be found: (1) Early Buddhist ethics is concerned with liberating
the self alone and is less concerned with others. (2) Classical Confucian ethics is
concerned with the happiness of the collective group and is less concerned with individual
happiness.

In comparison, we might discuss all and sundry similarities and differences
indiscriminately. Focusing on self transformation will allow us to limit the scope of
comparison. From this perspective, similarities between the two systems will emerge
regarding self-transformative ideas, methods, and modes of realization. However, a
consideration of the reasons for self transformation and of the metaphysical backgrounds
of the two moral systems will reveal differences between the two traditions. In this
context, the main goals of this study can be addressed: From the perspective of
self-transformation, early Buddhist ethics are similar to classical Confucian ethics in
spite of some major differences between the groundwork of their respective metaphysics of
morals. This study will also show that compassion (karuna) is the core virtue of early
Buddhist ethics and that it is very similar to the core virtue of classical Confucianism,
benevolence. I will refer to these two terms together in this study as "the
virtue." I maintain that the realization of compassion/benevolence is indispensable
for the highest moral achievement of the self and others.

To sum up: Chapter one will be a preliminary study. In order to fully understand
the two ethical traditions, their social milieu and views on human nature need to be
sketched. In chapter two, the frameworks of the metaphysics of morals of the two
traditions will be discussed in order to show the theoretical foundations of
self-transformative morals in both systems. In chapter three, I will discuss the main
moral virtue necessary for the transformation of the self. Following my claim that a
realization of the main moral virtue, that is, of compassion/benevolence, is a way of
self-transformation, I will analyze its functional mechanism through a consideration of
modem theoretical perspectives. In chapter four, I will discuss how the main virtue is
applied to educational and political institutions. In the last chapter, I will examine the
virtue in light of the problem of moral objectivity. In this chapter, we will come to an
understanding of the nature of this virtue, and of the characteristics of the two ethical
systems as well. In conclusion, I will briefly summarize the results of this study. In
addition, I will interpret the moral goal, nibbana tao, in the framework of the two
ethical systems and consider the life pattern of the self-transformed person.

As long as we consider the clarification of human thought, and especially
ethical thought as one of the tasks of philosophy, the method of comparison suggests
itself as an effective tool. The method of comparison taken in this study will help us to
clarify the ethical ideas of early Buddhism, and also of classical Confucianism.
Furthermore, the comparative method will help us to identify some hidden assumptions, and
enable us to understand certain concepts. I will adopt the method of reviewing early
Buddhist texts in a direct comparison with classical Confucian texts. For the purpose of
these comparisons, it win be useful to identify and to analyze equivalent concepts in both
systems. Finally, in interpreting the ethics of both systems, I will apply modem ethical
perspectives and modem legal thoughts.

CONTENTS:
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONSFOREWORDINTRODUCTION
A. PURPOSE
B. PHILOSOPHICAL JUSTIFICATION OF SELF-TRANSFORMATIONCHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY REFLECTION:
SOCIAL SETTINGS AND VIEWS OF HUMAN NATURE
A. THE SOCIAL SETTINGS AND ITS CRITICAL EXAMINERS
B. THE VIEW OF HUMAN NATURECHAPTER II. METAPHYSICAL GROUNDWORK OF VIRTUE
A. EARLY BUDDHISM
B. CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM
C. COMPARATIVE ANALYSISCHAPTER III. DEVELOPMENT OF COMPASSION AND
BENEVOLENCE
A. SELF-RESTRAINT AND COMPASSION IN EARLY BUDDHISM (1) Self-restraint (2) Development of
Compassion
B. SELF-OVERCOMING AND BENEVOLENCE IN CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM (1) Self-overcoming (2)
Development of Benevolence C. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
CHAPTER IV. REALIZATION OF COMPASSION AND BENEVOLENCE
A. EARLY BUDDHISM (1) An Educational Activity (2) Politics a. Politics by Righteousness,
b. The Way to Maintain Righteousness, c. The Principles of Politics, d. Politics and
Nature, A Compassionate Action of Lay People
B. CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM (1) An Educational Activity (2) Governing a. The Quality of a
King 8. A Proposition of Politics: Rectification of Names c. The Principles of Governing
d. Governing and Nature 98 e. Governing and Wealth
C. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
CHAPTER V. THE OBJECTIVITY OF COMPASSION AND BENEVOLENCE
A. A RECENT ARGUMENT CONCERNING MORAL OBJECTIVITY
B. THE NON-SEPARABILITY OF FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND MORAL PRACTICE
C. THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE VIRTUE IN TERMS OF ITS UNIVERSAL ACCEPTABILITY
D. THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE VIRTUE IN PRACTICECONCLUSION
NOTES
APPENDIX
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX